Blog move to Dreamhost now finalized


My various online bits are now living at Dreamhost. It took only a few minutes to install my stuff, copy over the files, and get up and running. It's taken a bit longer to have DNS changes propagate, but I think that process is pretty much over now. Wordpress seems pretty happy there, and I've installed copies of Drupal, Mediawiki and Lace (the cool ajax chat app), as well as a Quicktime streaming server and Jabber server. The last two were autoinstalls, so I just flicked them on to see what they did. Actually, everything but Lace could have been automatically installed, with subdomains and databases created automatically, but I opted to do the manual install because I already have copies of the apps configured.

So far, things seem to be working pretty well. They give an insane amount of disk space (20 GB to use as I need) and monthly bandwidth (1 TB/month, plus an extra 8 GB added each week), as well as SSH and FTP access.

I'm looking forward to playing around with Rails a bit, and have a place to host it.

The Dreamhost support team is also pretty darned responsive. I've had to contact them twice (once when their account creation form barfed on the apostrophe in my name, and once when the stats weren't being displayed). Very helpful, those Dreamhost folks. They also have 2 blogs that they use to communicate about status and other stuff. The off-site dreamhoststatus.com blog is a good way to keep up on pending changes or outtages. And their general blog is just plain entertaining - with a category dedicated to rants! It's good to see a decade-old hosting company that's grown rather large still be able to have a sense of humour.

Update: One of the things I'm loving about hosting at Dreamhost is that backups are trivial. I have a script in my hosted account that I can trigger via SSH, and it will rsync my entire home directory (including all files needed to host my domain and any subdomains) to my desktop box on campus for backup. And, because rsync is so cool, it only takes a few seconds, since only changed files are sent. So, I can make sure all of my 300+MB of files are backed up in about 10 seconds. Add a scripted mysqldump into the mix, and all data backups are up to date as well.


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